EVENTS

Briefing from the radioactive badlands of the American Southwest, 1954

[We are fortunate to have this transcript, taken by a company stenographer, from one of the early efforts of the resistance to instruct an army company in tactics. Although we now have more sophisticated technologies to hold these invaders in check, it is instructive too see how the American military in the 1950s struggled to cope with an unusual enemy, a struggle that was described in an excellent documentary produced by Warner Bros.]

Men — and ladies — the purpose of this briefing is to instruct you in the basic anatomy of the enemy. We have lost many soldiers to the assumption that these are just elephant sized beasts and that this is an exercise in big-game hunting; post-mortem analysis has found that many wounds that appear as if they should be instantly lethal actually miss major organs and allow the monsters to rampage on relatively unimpaired. I am here to shake up your assumptions and give you better targeting instruction so that you will more effectively kill the enemy.

Get this out of your heads right now. These are not overgrown familiar animals. These are giant ants.

Another purpose of this briefing is to teach you to respect the enemy. You may consider ants to be nothing but unpleasant nuisances, easily squashed without a moment’s thought, but these creatures have been endowed by their creator — or produced by millions of years of evolution — with unique traits that make them hardy and resilient, and in their new enlarged form, almost as hard to take down as a small tank. Do not underestimate them!

One thing we will not be discussing here is how these monsters came to be. In fact, the University eggheads are all telling us that it’s impossible for insects to grow so large, and mumbling about radiation and mutations and other such technical talk. We don’t give a damn. They’re here, and our mission is to slaughter them, root out their colonies, and exterminate the entire goddamned species, because this is America, and we aren’t going to stand by while big bugs eat our sweet American children.

The first thing you need to know about these big bugs is that they’re heavily armored. Their entire body is covered with thick sheets of a material called chitin — it’s a carbohydrate, chains of sugars, like the cellulose found in wood. It’s also a complex composite material, infiltrated with other substances like calcium carbonate to form rigid shells. It’s flexible, lightweight, and tough — our scientists are already working out its structure to build carbon fiber composites that will form the military armor of the future…but right now, the bugs are way ahead of us in armor technology. You’re going to have to crack that armor to kill them.

The bad news? Your handguns aren’t going to make a dent in this stuff, and even your M1 carbines don’t have enough punch to get through. Fragmentation grenades occasionally stun them, but mostly do little damage. It takes sustained fire from a .50 cal Browning machine gun to break through that armor, or better yet, use a 75mm recoilless rifle. Anything less, you’re just tickling them.

The other bad news? Let’s say you’ve got enough firepower to bust through that armor. What are you going to hit?

This is a standard military paper target; you all trained on this, and you know what to shoot. A head shot; instant kill, you take out the target’s brain, and it goes down and doesn’t move. Chest shot; major point of failure, the enemy dies instantly if you take out its heart, and if you miss a little bit, you blow out its lungs and its incapacitated and is going to bleed to death. Gut shot produces major trauma and bleeding, is probably going to kill the target eventually, but in the meantime, the shock puts them out of combat.

None of that is true for giant bugs. The hallmark of bug anatomy is redundancy and distributed functions. Sure, they’ve got a brain, and it’s roughly about where you expect it to be, between the eyes: but if you get through the armor, if you manage to get through the thick, rubbery swaddling of the massive jaw muscles that surround the brain, and you manage to blow it up, it’s got another one below its jaws…and then it’s got a chain of them in its chest. In fact, you may be in worse shape, since the front brain seems to be involved in restraint and inhibition. Take it out, and you’ve got a frenzied giant ant, a creature that will start charging around the battlefield like a chicken with its head cut off…an 8-ton armored chicken with claws.

Your best bet is to target the thoracic nerve complex: aim for where all those legs join the body, and blow that sucker up. It may not kill it instantly, but it will cripple and immobilize it.

What about shooting the heart and lungs? More bad news: they don’t have lungs. It’s another distributed system, with a network of tubes infiltrating the tissues to carry oxygen to them. Every goddamned little pore on their body is basically a nostril, and every contraction of the muscles flexes the cuticle like a bellows and draws air inside.

They do have a heart…or rather, hearts. There’s another chain of them running along the back of the thorax, about where your spine would be. However, they also have an open circulatory system: the hearts just push bodily fluids around, sloshing the insides with that yellow green stuff called hemolymph, or bug blood. All of that breathing and blood pumping stuff is integrated with muscular activity — you do the same thing to a lesser degree, with muscle contractions in your legs that push blood back to the heart, and coupling of breathing to arm movements — but bugs do it better. Their whole boxy armored body is a big pump that moves fluids and gasses around as they run and shred and fight. There is no single point of failure, no one critical target analogous to what we humans have — you can slow them down and impair them by blowing off big chunks of their bodies, but there’s no one weak spot that can flatten them.

Are there other organs that are points of weakness? Nope. No liver; instead, they have a tissue called the fat body, which is distributed under the cuticle and around the guts. Distributed, again. Kidneys? A kidney shot can incapacitate a human because they’re highly vascular organs with a sustained high internal blood pressure; bugs have ropy tubes called Malpighian tubules sloshing about in the hemolymph, without a particularly high pressure blood system. You can gut-shoot an ant — in fact, you can blow off that entire big gut structure called the gaster at the end of the body — and while it will eventually starve to death, it’s not going to be slowed at all.

Face it. These magnificent bastards are tougher than you are, better designed for combat than you are, and uglier and meaner than you are. All the tools and skills you’ve been trained in for killing people aren’t going to work on these brutes.

That’s why the company is being issued this: the M2 Flamethrower. It’s the perfect weapon against bugs, because instead of relying on damaging a single point of weakness, it causes massive systemic damage — distributed destruction for a resilient distributed system. We’ve also had great success with napalm air strikes on surface nests, but to root out the enemy takes soldiers invading their nests and taking the fire to the queen ant’s chamber, burning out the enemy at every step. It’s bug hunt time, and you’re going to be taking cleansing fires into the tunnels of your foes.

The best giant bug movie was the sci-fi classic “Starship Troopers”. That was a great movie cram-packed with every sci-fi cliche and trope possible. Not just giant bugs, but giant interstellar bugs controlled by a smart bug species that learned by sucking out the brains of humans. Awesome.

And Dina Meyer topless in a unisex shower scene. And Casper Van Dien’s naked backside. And a BDSM-worthy flogging scene. And a very young (but not topless) Denise Richards.

I think Chris is an apocalyptic madman, cunningly hiding from the giant bugs in secret desert enclaves, while writing angry missives to the world at large complaining about all the napalm and nukes despoiling the desert beauty. You want him on your side if you’re lost out there — he’s the only one who knows how to survive.

You’d have possible problems dealing with medicine (surgery in particular), if you wanted to do surgery your have to work around or through all the chitinous armour. Then again if you use the new kinds of surgery that use small incisions it might be possible to work through a weaker part of a joint rather then working through the chitin.

This of course assumes an insect alien would be concerned with health care. Health care being dependent on the costs of trying to heal an injured insect versus hatching a replacement. But then even in a starship troopers situation with thousands of expendable members there are some valuable members who would need to be preserved. The breeders and assuming some sort of intelligence the thinkers. Much easier to try to heal an expert in the field of alien rocketry then grow and train a new one.

The obvious problems with giant bugs are skirted in this post. The massive armour plates would be very hard to move around in needing all the muscle to carry them.

Related the diffuse air passage system that leads to the muscles would have to be a lot more complex to have all the air getting through the larger amour to the larger muscles underneath in order to power those muscles. I wonder if some sort of chemical dispersed as an aerosol targeting the muscle tissue would be a good road to countering the giant ants.

I do not fear them, I’m packing an M-93 Reality of Scale Launcher. One hit from it restores all the actual physical problems a very small insectoid would experience from being scaled up. Such as a poor strength-to-mass ratio, poor compound eye resolution, and breathing systems that require a higher surface area to mass ratio to work properly.

Taking it ant by ant with flamethrowers? A symbolic stalling tactic at best. Meanwhile, in a top-secret hollow-mountain bunker-laboratory somewhere in Nevada, top scientists are risking it all to develop the ultimate bioweapon against the giant-ant scourge: giant-ant-zombifying giant liver flukes!!
(unfortunately, funding has been delayed for the parallel giant snail-slimeball delivery-system project)

Having read the classic Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein, I refused to see the film. When I saw pictures of silly soldiers dressed like actual US Marines fighting the giant bugs, instead of using the Mobile Infantry augmented power suits described by Heinlein, I just thought: completely bogus!

I think Chris is an apocalyptic madman, cunningly hiding from the giant bugs in secret desert enclaves, while writing angry missives to the world at large complaining about all the napalm and nukes despoiling the desert beauty.

And culturing weaponized strains of Cordyceps unilateralis using the brains of captured MRA trolls as growth media.

That’s what he wants us to think, and he is very convincing. Don’t be fooled. He is an elaborate human suit worn by a Formicid colony. Have you ever seen him in the same room as a leafcutter ant? I didn’t think so.

Anyone who has played Fallout can tell you the trick is to hit the forebrain of the Ants in the center of a grouping, that way they frenzy and start taking out the rest. Then once they’re softened up you can dispatch with flame throwers.

Also given the strain that their size causes (by virtue of being impossible) their legs should be structural weak points. I say aim for the legs, if we can get two down they may just collapse under their own weight and crush themselves.

The video you linked to of the grasshopper attack on Chicago was posted by a publisher promoting its book about classic horror movie shows in Chicago (“Chicago TV Horror Movie Shows: From Shock Theatre to Svengoolie”). I MUST get me a copy of that! I grew up watching Sven, and was thrilled to learn he’s now gone national on the ME-TV network. Unfortunately Rich Koz (Sven) had a nasty heart attack and bypass in November, but he’s recovering and is told he’ll be able to return to work eventually.

Hmmm, I could swear I remember reading an essay on why giant bugs are not the threat the way they are depicted in “Them” and “The Beginning of the End” due to the inneficiency of chitinous exoskeleton vs an osteo-endoskeleton. The suggestion was that given the amount of load placed on the relatively brittle chitin, you don’t really need to use a 50 cal…..just throw rocks.

Given how their respiration works, wouldn’t normal ants grown to giant size just suffocate?

In terms of reality, yeah. You would need a huge increase in available oxygen on the air, on the scale that a forest fire from lightning would look, and act, more like orbital bombardment using a giant space laser (i.e., damn close to glassing the forest). The practical limit in size isn’t just oxygenation, though that is a big one, but, limbs have narrow points, where musculature and the like need to pass, and where those fluids need to slosh around, and the ratio between the size of a limb, and the size of the opening that connects, due to structural requirements, and flexibility, creates a nasty curve ratio, where the bigger you scale, the smaller the percentage of, comparable, space you have in those joints in which to fit everything needed to make it all work.

Now.. If you have much lower gravity, or something, then you would also need less muscle in those places, which would free up some space, maybe.. But, the math just won’t allow such a framework to operate efficiently, without increasing the oxygenation rate, somehow, without also increasing the size of the systems that provide it.

That said.. I am so going to refer this post to the forums for the Post Apocalyptic role play sims I visit. lol

@eric: As a long-time player of Hal Clement’s game of pointing out all of the problems with a story, I approve of your choice of weapons.

I add the following to all of the other impossibilities of giant insects that people have mentioned:

Consider thermoregulation. Insects don’t sweat. A human-sized ant running around the landscape would promptly overheat and collapse from heatstroke; and a colony of human-sized ants would be unable to keep the larvae at the right temperatures for development. Termite-style nests would do somewhat better, but not well enough. Passive airflow is only so efficient.

Others have noted that chitin is fairly lousy armor, and it is. Few tens of MPa yield strength. That’s about the same as nylon, half as strong as bone, a tenth as strong as steel plate, and 2% as strong as Kevlar. 2 cm thick chitin would be neatly punched through by handgun rounds.

And as long as the giant insects are stupid, humans would win immediately. Don’t try to shoot them – use pheromone lures to pull them into a trap. Don’t go into the ant nest – check the surrounding ground for tunnels with ground-penetrating radar and then smash the place with an earthquake bomb. It’s like fighting zombies. You win by playing to your strengths. Nice thing about fighting giant animals: few moral dilemmas.

As you may have guessed, I’m not necessarily the most fun person to watch monster movies with.

Clearly, instead of shooting these magnificent creatures we should be putting them to good use. The only rational option is to put a couple of them into every school in America to keep our children safe. They’re a lot cheaper than retired policemen, and what could possibly go wrong?

PZ, if you’re taking anti-inflammatories for “teninitis” you can stop now: they won’t do any good (and weird dreams are a fairly common side effect!)
Tendinitis is more properly referred to as tendonosis now because “itis” refers to an inflammatory condition and it’s been known for some time that tendons don’t get inflamed.
Here’s an editorial from the British Medical Journal criticising doctors for prescribing anti-inflammatories:http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7338/626
More information on tendonosis:http://www.tendinosis.org/current.html
Hope it gets better soon. It took me almost 2 years to get my patellar tendonosis under control.

Triffids grow in desert regions. The USA government must bring triffids to the southwest. Not only will they kill the ants but they will stop the Anti-Brown Menace forces in Arizona.
…
If that does not work, we hire Dalek mercenaries. What could possibly go wrong?
…
Please remember Police Sgt. Ben Peterson’s sacrifice and contribute to the New Mexico State Troopers’ Widow and Orphan Fund. Make check payable to CASH and mail to this address. Thank You.

Dave Berry actually had an article about how to defeat THEM. First you need a giant twinkie to lure them to one spot. Then you have giant space platforms in low earth orbit that look like sales racks at a boot store. Launch a four story boot toward the target on the surface and you have a powerful STOMP OF DOOM.

Edward Keller, age 13, is an enthusiastic reader of science fiction. He is being raised by his aunt Clara who keeps telling him to “face reality.” One night, his usual stfnal dream turns to horror as a myriad of huge Claras pursues him, telling him to “face reality.” If he cannot awake, he will be trapped in a world of giant aunts!

This… sounds like something Cave would do (or cause).
“Hey, I heard you got a giant ant problem. Don’t worry, I got your solution. Mantis man! Step right up to get your dose of praying mantis DNA! Fight the giant ant menace! Save… what’s that Greg?”
“… mmph mph… mmph…”
“… what do you mean praying mantis don’t eat ants?”
“… mmph mph…”
“Oh… okay, for those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Bad news is we’re postponing those tests indefinitely. Good news is we’ve got a much better test for you: fighting an army of mantis men. Pick up a rifle and follow the yellow line. You’ll know when the test starts.”

This is, of course, proof of the existence of God. Little boys have been frying ants for a very long time, troops will not need any special training to understand the process, and then we find out that this behavior, obviously a race memory placed there by a higher power, is exactly what we need to save mankind. Coincidence … I think not.

That and a string of sunny days and we win. We might need a some sort of high-tech low-light magnifying glass for frying the bastards by moonlight. I’m sure the eggheads will figure it out.

@lron
#84
Or an array of orbital mirrors to redirect sunlight from the sun.
One design off the top of my head would be as followed.
A set of mirrors orbiting around the Sun-Earth L2 point (using similar orbit as the Herschel Space Observatory), with large enough orbit to avoid shadowing from earth. The advantage is that since the L2 point is essentially always located at the night-side of earth, the mirrors would have near 100% availability to focus sun’s energy to the night-side of earth (on full-moon, several satellites may be unavailable on account of the moon blocking it).
As for how big a mirror we need… well, not sure. Anyone know a rough estimate on the equilibrium temperature of a insect carapace given the watt/meter of thermal energy?

Large insects? Easy. Some sort of suitably scaled up rolled up newspaper wielded by a giant robot. Obviously.

Translation: should Godzilla prove to be insufficient, build Mechagodzilla !!

Clearly, instead of shooting these magnificent creatures we should be putting them to good use. The only rational option is to put a couple of them into every school in America to keep our children safe. They’re a lot cheaper than retired policemen, and what could possibly go wrong?

Day saved, Molly nomination won.

So what we need is a GM version of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis that makes the giant ants all want to climb roadside billboards and wait there for jesus. Side benefit: no more billboards.

I was told that there was no such thing as overkill, but I think you’ve managed it. Why build weapons of mass destruction when you can simply run the ants in circles?

Re. your question:

At ~1000 W/m^2, the ants would be heated to roughly the boiling point of water. At 10,000 W/m^2, normal bees immediately turn into expanding clouds of foul-smelling vapor. I know this because a swarm of bees once flew through the beam line of NASA’s Goldstone radar facility. For a fraction of a second, instead of observing near-Earth asteroids we were operating a 450 kilowatt bug zapper.

Larger bugs would last a bit longer, since they have more mass per unit area to heat up, but only for a couple of minutes. That also sets the entire landscape around them on fire. So Yeah. Overkill.

There’s also an easier (and much safer) way to infiltrate the nest to get to the queen than burning your way in one ant at a time.

Synthetic pheromones.

Are the any chemists out there working on synthesizing worker ant pheromones? Give the infiltration force enough anointment with these, and the soldier and worker ants will ignore them as they walk in.

Only three issues:
1) Don’t be stingy with the pheromones! The moment you smell like food rather than fellow ant, you’re lunch and the mission is over.
2) Don’t get stepped on or crushed by moving ants. Remember at all times that the enemy will not notice or care about about relative human fragility–and you don’t want them to notice!
3) Be prepared for a long mission, unless you can acquire a ground-penetrating-radar map of the tunnels and identify the queen’s chamber. Don’t get lost! On the plus side, once a queen starts egglaying she’s completely immobile, so you won’t have to track a moving target.

Personally, I thing my weapon of choice would be a grenade provided by Orkin.

Not so awesome as it may appear. The back-reflection from the expanding cloud of bee-steam was so strong that it heated up and cracked the microwave window of the receiver vacuum chamber. We had to stop while the site crew swapped out the window and pumped the vacuum down again. For a similar problem: the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico fairly frequently microwaves birds that get stuck in between the secondary and tertiary mirrors. The optics there aren’t such that back-reflections damages the receivers, but the charred carcasses need to be picked off of the tertiary every so often.

Re. the pheromones: far safer to ring the nest with aversion pheromone from the air to keep the ants in, scan the place with radar, and lob in the bunker busters. You wouldn’t want to get up close and personal with unthinking killing machines, no matter how you smelled.

@michaelbusch
#87
Okay, sun-light is about 1000 watt / m^2. So a ratio of 10:1 should be sufficient to get up to 10,000 watt / m^2.

I was told that there was no such thing as overkill, but I think you’ve managed it. Why build weapons of mass destruction when you can simply run the ants in circles?

That’s assuming we know how to synthesize ant pheromone at large quantity quickly, and what happens if the next menace is not ants? Orbital solar ray is good multi-purpose solution for just about any organic (and probably some non-organic) threats. Unless it’s a micro-organism that feeds off thermal energy to grow, then we need to invent freeze rays.

Plus, we already have the technical know how to do it, if it wasn’t for the fact that it will be freakishly expensive. But then again, when you’re facing giant ant threat, cost might not be an issue.

Beside, what fun is talking about giant ant menace if we can’t propose an overkill solution?

The back-reflection from the expanding cloud of bee-steam was so strong that it heated up and cracked the microwave window of the receiver vacuum chamber.

Yikes! Not what you want with a telescope. I wasn’t thinking about backscatter effects. I’m glad the damage wasn’t any worse! Better the window than window + detectors…

On the pheromones subject, I was thinking of the “Our only hope is to invade the hive” message in the OP, which seems to imply that bombs are not available. I do agree that getting up close and personal is not optimal.

How about an Orkin bomb the size of a couch, scented like a larval ant, with a detonation device to go off half an hour after being grasped and carried off by a worker ant? That should kill the nursery and surrounding area occupants, with a good chance of getting the queen in the process, especially if you left several. Does that sound better?

At least none of the other menaces mentioned in the OP have the kind of social structure that ants have. This has pluses and minuses.

On the plus side: Grasshoppers etc. don’t work together. You’re destroying one individual at a time.

On the minus side: Grasshoppers etc. don’t breed communally. You’re destroying one individual at a time, and if you miss a few, they’ll be back!

Some of these critters will be easier to attack than others. Giant moths? Giant bug zappers! Tarantulas? Can we synthesize Tarantula hawk venom and harpoon the critters with giant hypodermics of it? At least spiders have (I think–someone correct me if I’m wrong) more fragile skin than ants. Grasshoppers? High-powered rifle shot to the hind-leg knee joints should slow them down, and again, I think they’re more fragile than ants.

Aim for one of the middle legs. As hexapods walk by alternating two triangles of left-right-left and right-left-right feet, as soon as they take two steps they’ll fall over on the side that has the single support missing.